


The Dizzying Possibilities of Verticality

by justholdstill



Category: History Boys (2006)
Genre: M/M, Mental Illness, References to Depression, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-17 01:07:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11840799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justholdstill/pseuds/justholdstill
Summary: They both discover that proximity is a double-edged sword – that it is possible to be both tender toward and irritable to a person with whom you live in very close quarters.





	The Dizzying Possibilities of Verticality

**Author's Note:**

> written in 2007 for brittlesmile as part of a holiday exchange, I think. This one will always be near & dear to my heart, and not just because I'm (still) infatuated with Scripps.
> 
> Quotes from “Memorabilia” and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning, Robbie Burns’ “To a Kiss”, and Louis Macneice’s, “The Suicide”.

**The Dizzying Possibilities of Verticality**

_And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow/ Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast/ That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,/ That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time/ A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme. ___

____

____

_-Louis Macneice, Sunday Morning_

__  
_*_  


Time is a luxury he has too much of, these days; sanity is something he’d never thought of as luxurious until he had too little of it. Hours drag on him, harass him with their slowness; minutes prick at him until he feels painfully aware of every little shift of the clock’s hands. 

Posner isn’t purposely counting the days, or keeping any sort of calendar, hasn’t scratched a tally into the yellow paint that he hates on the walls of his room – he isn’t a prisoner - but all the same, all the time, he has a precise knowledge of how long he’s been here. That kind of clarity is unusual in most of the patients here, the doctors tell him, and Posner thinks he can imagine why – day after day is the same, and whether outside it’s butter-yellow sunshine, or the flannel-grey skies that accompany the omnipresent rain, nothing changes here; time bleeds into itself, and blurs like the watercolour paints he uses in Art Therapy. 

Though he’s not counting seconds, he’s begun counting everything else – the wide green stripes on his hospital-issue pyjamas, panes of glass, the fine hairs on the backs of his hands, board game pieces, ceiling tiles, freckles, how many peas and square-cut carrots are in the soup at dinner. He doesn’t tell anyone what he’s doing, because they’ll want to Observe him (a process which merits the capital O), and suspect him of Obsessive-Compulsive tendencies, for which there’s likely another pill to take, and he’ll lose the only way he has of passing the time that’s wholly his. 

He’s supposed to keep a journal, but its pages remain stubbornly blank and hard to fill. He wants to believe nothing is wasted, but the lace-like doodles and impossible animals sketched in the margins of his notebook hold no secrets, hide no combination that might unlock his illness. He considers filling the whiteness with the numbers he is collecting: 30 (the number of beds on this floor); 17 (the number of patients whose names he doesn’t know); 4 (the number of times he is expected to attend Group in a week); 12 (the number of times he goes outside for a cigarette break during the day, even though he’s never smoked in his life and doesn’t intend to start now); 1 (the number of times he’s tried to kill himself). There is never anything to write about, and somehow Posner is intimidated by the prosaic nature of his thoughts – though almost indecently clever, he falls short of originality, of genius; more importantly, he thinks, he lacks emotional conviction. 

_Oxford educated_ , his files must say, which he often imagines accounts for the particular sad kindness in the way the nurses deal with him – he thinks that they sometimes talk amongst themselves about him, and wonder what kind of demons might weigh on his thin shoulders, whether they are partner to or offspring of his madness. They aren’t literary demons, that one thing is certain – Posner chuckles to himself as his hand hovers still over the page. 

He thinks of History then (yet another process which requires the capital), of the cultural secrets implicit in textbooks on that subjects; he envisions writing a novel in which the countries of the world are cast as patients in a psychiatric hospital, and although Russia might come to blows with China in a particularly heated group session, although England watches what America does with knowing, envious eyes, they are all of them separate, and alone, and lonely. 

* 

The Hospital Gods, tacitly understood to be an administration without much of a sense of humour, allow him a weekend pass every second Saturday, and twice a month Scripps comes dutifully in his car, and sometimes, if the weather is good, they go speeding through the countryside; instead of counting ceiling tiles, or his prescriptions, Posner counts sheep and cows, the number of roadside pubs they pass, the number of girls they see who have wild-dyed hair and who live in tiny towns, and sometimes he doesn’t count at all, but watches Scripps as he smokes a cigarette (thinking that he is one of the few people he knows for whom that habit carries no stigma; it is simply and unaffectedly something he does, and not all that often besides), or talks about whatever comes to mind. 

Occasionally he sings something, in a voice lately disused, or quotes poetry, what of it he can remember; Scripps favours Robert Browning, and so Posner’s stilted recitations underscore their afternoon jaunts:

_But you were living before that,_  
And also you are living after;  
And the memory I started at---  
My starting moves your laughter. 

Or if he is nursing an especially morbid mood:

_That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,  
Looking as if she were alive._

Scripps himself, his being there, is a luxury too, but it’s also a necessity.

* 

Nights, Posner discovers how elastic silence can be, how it stretches and contracts. How sometimes it is thin as a membrane, a womblike wall through which he receives veiled impressions of the world; a vibration in the cool September air could be the remnants of a car backfiring thirty miles away; there might be a nearly imperceptible whiff of something on the breeze, perhaps the roast chicken someone is having for dinner the next town over. 

Sometimes the quiet is so deep and long it feels like a fortress against which the ocean batters, and he alternately longs to remain within it, impenetrable and unknowable, or to have it broken, so that he can walk free. 

* 

Fog skirts the long grove of trees that lines the long drive up to this place, but remains curiously apart from the building itself; it seems to be around, but not above, and very high up there is a hint of what might be blue skies and sunshine, as if horizontal distance no longer matters, and has been replaced with the dizzying possibilities of verticality. Today the world will right itself. 

Posner’s things are tidily arranged within a pair of suitcases; he has replaced his ugly, worn pyjamas with his own blue jeans and an unremarkable knit jumper, revelling in the unfamiliar feeling of real clothes. He sits in the television room all by himself while the others are at breakfast, with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the tall, narrow windows. He has never been so tired, nor so wide awake in his life. Today he is leaving – at eleven o’clock. Scripps’ rust-bucket of a blue Datsun will pull up to the gate through the mist and ferry Posner away, streaming toward the impending day as so many times before, only there will be no more thoughts of the place he is now; Posner will be glad, and at the moment he feels no fear. 

* 

He does not much more than sleep for the first three days, waking sometimes to the muted glow of an afternoon sun coming through the curtains and bathing the walls, before dozing off again. Occasionally Scripps sits with him, offers food and water, a cup of tea, but mostly just puts his feet up on the end of the bed and his wire-rimmed glasses on his face, scrawling on a pad of legal paper in a way he hopes suggests he isn’t going away anytime soon. 

It takes time, but eventually Posner stays awake for longer and longer periods, and can be convinced to bathe, and sometimes coaxed out into their shoebox of a garden. He takes to keeping Scripps company in his study, apparently concerned that Scripps is writing about him, breaking all the rules of etiquette about being-around-a-writer-who’s-writing that Scripps has ever thought of. He leans over Scripps’ shoulder to see what new words have materialized on the page; he talks; he slurps his coffee with great zest; Posner persists in being in the room even when Scripps tells him in no uncertain terms that he’s going to hang him out the window by his ankles. 

Then one night, finally, out of what seems to be desperation, Posner leans down and across Scripps’ solid body, curls a hand around the back of his neck, and kisses his mouth. 

Nothing much in their life is quiet, at this point – the rooms almost always ringing with the cacophonous din of traffic that ascends from below, the muffled thump of their landlady’s cane as she moves around the apartment above, the hard, compacted sound of typewriter keys hitting home, the rare bird cooing in the eaves – but when Posner kisses him, a moment which is as unexpected and as complicated as Posner himself, Scripps hears nothing but the most profound silence, sculpted by the spaces in between Posner’s gasping breath 

* 

Scripps has no idea how to decode this happening, whether to believe Posner is back to his old self, or simply in the grip of some new version of insanity. He gets used to the fastidious detail with which Posner re-arranges his rooms, as if he can somehow outwardly order the chaos within both their heads. He gets used to ignoring the other man’s presence when he’s working. He gets used to tiptoeing around the flat in the mornings as he prepares to work, whispering to the cat, whistling to himself, but softly. 

And Posner hears all this, as he’d heard and thus remembered stirrings of life as he lay in the hospital; this time, he wants to wake to see the source of the noise, to witness the life of the man who’s doing the waking. 

*

By the time summer has found its blazing wings, there’s something new to count – that which Burns describes as a “Humid seal of soft affections/Tend'rest pledge of future bliss”. Scripps has to wait two weeks for the second kiss , but when it does – all soft slowed-down movements and being leant back against his desk, a hand curling in the front of his shirt - he is glad Posner does it so infrequently, because it makes his head spin for days. The third is barely worth mentioning, just a gentle peck on the cheek, and the fourth is barely mentionable, initiated by Scripps just as Posner is coming out of the shower – they’ll both remember the bruises. 

 

*

Winter comes around, as it does – they freeze, not quite to death, in their drafty flat, which is luxurious in terms of space, but spare in terms of insulation. They wear mittens and jumpers to bed, sometimes making love without taking either article off. They eat only because Scripps managed to sell a few articles back in the fall, and now regularly pens a column for several local newspapers. Somehow they manage to maintain having water and electricity; Posner never imagined that an inheritance might be used to satisfy such practical ends. 

They both discover that proximity is a double-edged sword – that it is possible to be both tender toward and irritable to a person with whom you live in very close quarters. Scripps learns firsthand that it is something far short of a cakewalk to live with and care about someone who is depressed; he couldn’t say that Posner has ever been nasty, but there are times he wants to tear out his hair and throw up his hands, because he simply cannot do it anymore. Posner finds that having a mental illness and a normal life at the same time is nothing like the way it always looks in TV movies – deep down he fears that he is still not well, longing to be unattached to Scripps so that neither of them is hurt when he relapses. Nightmares dog his sleep; he senses that Scripps is watching him closely without saying anything - and feels a flutter in his stomach because that’s Scripps all over – senses his relief each time Posner chooses to live though the night. Posner even quotes to him, one evening, as they are lying surrounded by Scripps’s mounds of books and discarded notepaper:

_To those who knew him for all that mess in the street  
This man with the shy smile has left behind  
Something that was intact._

*

They continue to drive. Sometimes down side streets they’d never noticed before, sometimes out of the city and down whatever road takes their fancy, often to parks where they walk, and say nothing, or have a picnic, and say nothing, and sometimes they just drive and drive, and sometimes Scripps’ hand will close around Posner’s , and sometimes they pretend it didn’t happen and sometimes they don’t, and sometimes it will happen the other way around; sometimes Posner is shy around Scripps, many times bold; sometimes, as they are preparing to go to bed, Posner stands in the hallway, under the single lightbulb, looking at the threadbare carpet under his toes. And sometimes Scripps leans out the bathroom door and kisses him (by now they’ve stopped counting) with a mouth full of toothpaste, and sometimes they think they are in love, and sometimes they know they are right.


End file.
